‘So you’ve solved all your problems, then?” Kalaya prompted gently.
“Hardly, we’ve just exchanged them. Instead of countries and religious groups battling, we have corporations at each other’s throats. Usually, it doesn’t get violent, but it still can be very cutthroat.”
“And what is the military’s role in all this?”
“The military is supposed to be our impartial guardian of the planet’s interests. A watchdog of sorts that allows the corporations to act freely without having to field their own navies and get into armed conflicts. Increasingly, though, there are those who have started to worry that its leadership is not being held accountable to the degree it should. I do know that they have been diverting a lot of resources into shipbuilding and expanding the navy exponentially. I’m not sure why they are needed, but it may mean increased trouble on the horizon. In the meantime, the corporations are grabbing up as much land and resources as they can. That’s why the Jeff is here for the Pendacis Corporation.”
“Interesting,” Kalaya murmured, then lapsed into silence.
More time passed and the ride ended. We got off and she took the lead again, taking me through more twists and turns until we came to a long hallway of doors. Each door had writing next to it that rather looked like names. I guess we were in the Aurora’s standard crew dorm area, but why?
She stopped in front of a door that looked no different from any of the others.
“Are we going to go right in without permission?” I said nervously.
“Kodo’s room is a few doors down; besides, we have permission, mine! So come on in!” The door opened to reveal a room larger than I thought it would be, but nowhere near as spacious as the one they gave me. The place was nicely furnished, and I actually quite enjoyed seeing it, but there was one thing that kept nagging at me the more I looked around. This looks like a woman’s apartment.
“Welcome to my room!” Kalaya said excitedly.
“Your room?” I said, baffled.
“Yep, even I don’t rate one of those high-class VIP rooms like you do.”
“But why? What use is a room to you that you can’t occupy?”
She smiled slightly and waved around to the room. “Take a look around.”
I didn’t know how that answered my question at all but did as she suggested. She had a front area that was a combination living room and kitchen with a bedroom and bathroom attached to the back. There were nice looking faux-wood floors, an angled couch in the corner with a small glass coffee table and a space-age vid set. The other corner had a fireplace that was crackling nicely. I walked over to take a closer look at the little things she had lining the hearth of the fireplace. They were small statues of various creatures, most looked like something out of fairy tales. I recognized a crystal dragon, a large feathered cat of some kind, and some sort of rodent, but with no frame of reference, I couldn’t tell how large it was in real life…if it was ever real at all. The centerpiece of the display was a statue of a six-inch girl with gossamer wings. She had gorgeous red braids, sparkling eyes, and wore a short dress that seemed to shimmer of its own accord in the muted light. It was so finely decorated that I half expected her to come to life before my eyes.
“May I?” I requested, and she acquiesced with a nod. I reached out and carefully touched the base of the statue. My fingers contacted something hard, and the piece moved a half-inch or so.
“I’d be careful with that one, pixies are a feisty bunch,” Kalaya grinned.
Quickly, I moved it back to its original resting place and looked back at my friend. “These are real! Like they are actually here, not a hologram.”
“Oh, they’re all real, that’s kind of my point in all this.”
“What do you mean?”
“My point is that you still see me as a program of some kind, a digital creation of someone else’s imagination, despite me telling you otherwise.” She looked around the room for a second and then invited me to take a seat on the guest chair of a small table for two in the kitchen area. I was skeptical, but the table and the chair seemed to be real enough, so I sat down as instructed. Moments later, the door opened and a half-sized humanoid robot entered the room dressed in some kind of fancy suit holding a silver plate. Without a word, it approached the table and set down a cup and saucer for each of us, followed by two bowls of sugar cubes and two small metal pitchers of cream. Finally, the robot set down were two large carafes of what smelled like real coffee!
Kalaya nodded to the robot butler, “Thank you.” With that, it left as quietly as it arrived. I was a little disappointed in myself that I didn’t say thank you as well, but it still didn’t feel right.
“Is this what I think it is?” I asked as I indulged myself in the rich smells.
“Coffee? Yes, it is Jamaican Blue Mountain, if I am not mistaken.”
“But how?”
She eyed me and then smiled her most evil, snarky smile. “If you keep questioning my gifts, I’ll just take them back.”
“Oh, no, you don’t!” I said, clinging to the carafe. She smiled and poured herself a cup from her own container, heavy on the cream and sugar, not that she needed sugar or caffeine in the first place. Confident she was only joking about taking the coffee away, I poured my own cup, savoring the aroma generated. I don’t know what she did to obtain it, but I could have died right there and gone to heaven, it was that good.
“This is incredible! What did you do to it?”
“Oh, just a wee bit of genetic restructuring and some judicious cross-breeding with Rigellian jellyfish.” What? “Just joking, well, about the jellyfish part anyway. Besides, agriculture is not the reason why I invited you here. I invited you here to clear the air, so to speak, and to answer your questions.”
Finally, some answers! “Any question?”
She nodded and brushed a few strands of exquisite fine hair out of her eyes. “For the most part, yes. However, if you get too technical with questions, it will take forever, so you will be getting the simple version of most things.”
Fair enough. “I guess my first question would be, what are you exactly?”
She smiled and cupped her mug in her hands as steam rose from the strong brown liquid. “Not what you think, I assure you. To start with, I am a synthetic organism, like Kodo already told you. And as he attempted to explain, I am very much alive by our society’s standards, just simply in a different state of being than you. “Like you, I have a mother and father, brothers and sisters, too; an entire family. We were brought into our world as babies, just like you were, knowing almost nothing about our world or what we are. Just eager minds ready to learn about the wondrous universe waiting for us out there. My parents raised me for many years until I had reached maturity; however, looking back, perhaps they should have held onto me a little longer. Anyway, eventually, I was ready to branch out on my own and find my own path.”
“How does that work, exactly?”
She rolled her eyes. “When a mommy and daddy love each other very, very much…”
“No, not that part…ok, yes, that part. You truly were a baby once?”
In response, her appearance regressed in a few seconds so she looked like she was only a few months old and absolutely adorable! She had the same evil smile and soft blonde locks, a soft, round face with dimples, and she looked at me with those incredible luminescent blue eyes.
“This is truly what I looked like when I was only three months old,” she said, but unlike her body, her voice didn’t change. So now, I have a baby sitting in a chair talking to me with the voice of a grown woman. Creepy.
“Ok, that’s adorable but still very disturbing.” She morphed back to normal and continued sipping her coffee.
“Ok, so you were a baby once, but how did your…”
“Parents make a child?”
I blushed shyly, “Yeah.”
“With hot, steamy sex and lots of it. As for the actual science, a pregnancy is still similar. The parents have sex
just as I said, but instead of sharing DNA, they share a data equivalent, basically, the condensed version of both parents’ life and experiences. I don’t normally like to use a computer reference here, but it will be the easiest way to explain it. When the parents mate, they combine a version of each operating system, if you will, to become the foundation of the child. However, the older we get, the larger our ‘operating systems’ get. So the older the parents, the more technically advanced they are, and their child will have the combined experiences of both parents.”
“So if the parents are older, the child will be smarter than both parents?”
“Well, the child is almost always ‘smarter’ as you put it. But generally, yes, the older the parents, the more advanced the child will be. In addition, the older the parents, the longer the term of the pregnancy, but not excessively so, a month or two at most. That is, of course, unless the mother is extremely lazy. It’s the mother’s responsibility to merge the two codes together to form the child, and yes, this happens inside the mother. It’s not like we just stick all the pieces together with glue or something.”
“Ok, so let me see if I’m following. The mother’s and father’s base code is woven together to build the base code of the child. This base code’s complexity varies based on the age and complexity of each parent. Correct?”
“More or less.”
“You mentioned a physical location?”
“Ah, yes. As you know, we can’t exist without something to live in, just like you need a planet or a ship to live on. For us, we have supercomputers, for lack of a better word. These computers are tangible things that we rely on to live. If something happened to them, we would die; it’s as simple as that. As you can guess, these computers are not given to us for free, nor is the space they take up. It is our responsibility to get jobs to pay for them once we grow up. Until that time, our parents pay the bills for us just like they do for you, only ours are cheaper.”
“That doesn’t sound very fair. You are being forced to work just to have the right to live.”
“We’re by no means slaves if that’s what you’re getting at. We are highly prized in Quetanae society and are very well paid. I have never heard of someone of our race not having money to pay the bills. Hell, I have more money than I will ever be able to spend even if I tried at this point. Besides, if we didn’t work, we would go crazy from boredom. There aren’t all that many of us, so scarcity means we will never be without a job.”
“And your computer home is now part of this ship?”
“Yep, in fact, there were supposed to be four of us for this trip, but the others didn’t make it in time for the launch so there are three empty computer shells all wired in and ready to go.”
“Where are they?”
“Sorry, Laree, that’s classified.” I could understand that. Ok, time to change the subject then.
“So, your hologram image, what’s up with that?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, looking herself over self-consciously. “I think I look incredible.”
“Yes, but why did you choose that as your image?”
“I didn’t choose it,” she said plainly.
“Huh? Then who did?”
“No one, this is what I really look like. Do you humans get to choose what you look like? Excluding surgeries and cell modification, no, of course, not. That’s the body you were born with and this is the one that I was born with.”
“I’m not following.”
She sighed again, “This is my true appearance. If you magically made me a Quetanae, I would look like this. The holograms are part of our society and our way of life. Not to sound lame, but they make us who we are. This is my room because I spend my time here when I am not with you. I don’t just simply turn it on when I need to be seen, it’s real, and the things in it are real…just as I am real.”
“So you actually collect figurines?”
“Yes, is that so strange to imagine? As you know, space on a starship is very limited so collecting vintage sports cars is out, even though that sounds like it would be really cool.”
“But what pleasure do you get out of them? You can’t even touch them in reality.”
Kalaya took a little while to respond, getting up and pacing a little as if organizing her thoughts. “I collect them because I can and it pleases me. Again, you assume that our lives, needs, and desires are much different from a corporeal organism. Why was it customary in your people’s past for young lovers to gift diamonds as an engagement present?”
“I don’t know; they’re sparkly and pretty?” I said lamely.
“They are, that’s true, but the real reason was symbolic. The diamond was one of the hardest substances known to your kind, so hard that it was thought that they would survive forever. In essence, the gift giver of the diamond was saying that their love would last forever as well. Even though the couple had no more than an average lifespan, it was comforting to them to believe that this symbol of their love would remain in existence long after their own deaths. To me, my collection represents something that will live on past a simple loss of power or a catastrophic quantum drive crash. It is a small thing, but it says to the world that Kalaya was here, she was real, and she had an appreciation for small useless figurines.”
“You are real, Kalaya, I see that now. Forgive me, but my people have nothing like you. We were always bombarded by naysayers who told us that artificial intelligence would be the end of us. That is why the closest thing we have is something like the ‘hamster.’ We were taught to fear machines smarter than we are. How did your people and the Quetanae do it? Why aren’t your people running the show and the Quetanae mere serfs? Why haven’t you eliminated them for being inefficient and illogical?”
“Whoa there, Laree, first things first.” Kalaya shook her blonde head in evident exasperation, plopping back down in her chair. “You speak as if my people and the Quetanae are different species or something.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“By definition, I suppose, but I consider myself a Quetanae. I have a Quetanae identification card; I am a Quetanae citizen! Would it surprise you to learn that our original Quetanae creators used their own digitalized DNA to give us life?”
“But…with all your abilities, why don’t you consider yourselves superior to the average Quetanae?”
Kalaya tilted her head as if to reorient her thinking. “I think I grasp what you are trying to say. We are superior in some ways, crunching numbers, for example, complex organizational processes; but organic Quetanae are so much better at abstract concepts like design, personal feelings, spontaneity, things that cannot be measured on a spreadsheet. Truly, Laree, we have a mutualistic relationship; there is no need for either to feel superior. Remember the spirit of cooperation is ingrained in Quetanae society. We aren’t rivals to be bested; if anything, we envy the organics for their ability to go anywhere, do anything. Sometimes, even their annoying habits are endearing. Honestly, life would suck if we lost our organic Quetanae partners.”
She had a sad, faraway look in her eyes, and I picked up that it was time to change the subject again. “So, if you are spending time with us and spending time in your room, how do you accomplish all you do with the ship, robots, and drones?”
“Small things like that just happen when I need them to, like you not having to remember to breathe. For example, if I need something, it becomes available to me. Like right now, I should check on wyvern seven which is finishing up in production.” A section of the wall next to her turned into a monitor screen, displaying graphs and other information in her strange language. “And that information is now present.” She got up and touched a few things on the screen and it closed again. “That base code that I was talking about is what drives this ability. The more ‘advanced’ we are, the more capable we are of doing remote processes like this. It’s really quite simple from my standpoint.”
“So even though you have a vast network and a supercomputer at your dispos
al, you don’t notice?”
“Not on a conscious level. To me, I’m just a hot girl with a starship as her office.”
I guess she was right. She was definitely not what I thought; she was so much more. “You’re amazing, you know that?”
She beamed at me. “Was there ever any doubt?”
“But why tell me all this? It would be so much easier to keep me in the dark. After all, I’m only a simple human. So why?”
She smiled warmly and sat back down at the table with me. “Would it seriously weird you out to know that you remind me of my own mother?”
“I do?”
She nodded vigorously. “Not the huffing, puffing, gonna die if I have to run another step, screaming like a hysterical little girl part, but you have her heart and passion.”
I wasn’t sure if I was just complimented or insulted, but I swallowed hard and managed to squeak out, “Who was your mother?”
“A very kind, loving person…and a policewoman. It always made things awkward for me when I saw her in action. Oh, look it’s mommy in her pretty uniform. Oh no! She just ripped that guy’s head off!” What the hell? I remind her of this woman? In what possible way do I do that? “But also like her, you have a keen mind and a generous personality. And in remembrance of her, I have a favor to ask of you.”
“Name it.”
“I need you to take care of Kodo for me,” she said solemnly, but she forced an uneasy smile.
“Are you going somewhere we don’t know about?” I asked, concerned by what she was about to ask of me.
“Absolutely not, and that is the key point, I can never leave the Aurora. If we can’t fix the ship by the time the Geoffrey Laird arrives, then I need you to take him with you. He is a stubborn man; trust me on that. He will never give up on this ship willingly, even if staying is pointless and will cost him his life. Therefore, it would be best if you took him away by any means necessary. I don’t care if you have to knock him out; hell, I’ll even help you.”
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